


The Circular Nature of Thought (or Grizz taking himself far too seriously)

by orphan_account



Series: Quia Absurdum [1]
Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, M/M, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 21:46:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19304461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Grizz getting introspective about how his experiences and Sam's influence how they go about being actual people. Or something like that.





	The Circular Nature of Thought (or Grizz taking himself far too seriously)

**Author's Note:**

> Yo Sam doesn't get enough credit for maintaining a cool personality while having everything about him fully in the public eye, especially in small town america, and i like to think Grizzyboy notices that.
> 
> Its big Analyze Grizz hours my dudes.

So here's the thing, Grizz is a Big Motherfucker. It's something his mom used to grumble about affectionately, something about linebacker shoulders ramming her in the bladder at all hours of the night and the gory details of giving birth to a near ten pound baby with a smirk as he cringed away. He's tall and wide and packed with more muscle than most actual adults, let alone kids his age. His face is confusing, blunt and round with a high wedge of a nose and a thick brow that all comes together  _ somehow _ but not in a way that makes sense; he's got soft eyes though and tall arching eyebrows that give away his gentle nature as if he wasn't already more of an open book than his parents would like. His mom, as boisterous and friendly as she was,  _ is? Was?  _ She worried about it. She fretted openly and, as fondly as she kept albums of his dancing years, nipped any gentleness in the bud. Well she tried to. 

 

The point remains though that Grizz is fucking huge and he doesn't look  _ Gay _ . Big Gay, capital G Gay. 

 

It's not something that he'll admit to being glad about, he prides himself on being the only one of his friends to really exercise critical thinking and expand beyond the insular guidelines quietly imposed by their small town predecessors. It helps though, it keeps him from being a victim of public speculation, allowed him to come to his own conclusions about why Luke used to make him feel a certain type of way or why he was  _ so  _ fucking careful about keeping headlights forward in the showers after practice. It helped to put on his letterman jacket and tower over everything and everyone so that he  _ could  _ delve into literature,  _ could  _ talk about Jane Austen and quote plays and poems freely without people looking too hard at what he didn't want them prying into. The worst he got was Clark's easy mocking-  _ oh look, I'm Gareth, I read books like boys jerk off _ .

 

It works for him, and he was more grateful than ever for it when Sam had looked over at him with cautious eyes and signed  _ I hated highschool. _

 

It made Grizz wonder what it felt like, the whole  _ deaf _ thing. Or rather having a defining trait about you so publicly known. Grizz is gay, Grizz is smart, but Grizz plays football, and at the end of the day thats all the context people have on him - football. So no one would think to assume the first two. It's a good fucking disguise, and thats a luxury people like Sam dont have. Deaf and Gay. Deaf and Gay. Deaf and Gay. That's what everyone  _ knows.  _ They don't look beyond it, and why would they? No one owes anyone anything really.

 

Sam had always been on his radar for one reason or another. People like him don't go unnoticed, but he tended to keep a careful distance. He and Rebecca Gelb are fused at the hip - always have been - and he  _ still _ has to curb down the little twinge of jealousy that he gets whenever he sees them laughing, hands flying quick and competent in a way that clearly took  _ years _ of practice. Grizz had heard him speak before, slow and slurred, and had seen the way people reacted to it. It made sense why he stuck close to Becca, probably exhausted by trying so hard to be _ understood _ . That's not to say that he's an outcast by any stretch, and it  _ is _ a generally accepted fact that he's gay, not that he had made any kind of announcement. Campbell had taken care of that. Fag was his name of choice for Sam, using it by rote in any even halfway public interaction with his brother. No one else seemed to give half a shit from what Grizz could tell, even Sam himself rolled his eyes most of the time. It was almost more like Campbell wanted to be inflammatory more than he really even cared about the actual gay part. 

 

Campbell hung out on the fringes of Grizz's group, mean and good looking enough to have a foothold with Harry's crowd more than anything, but he crossed paths with Grizz enough that Sam had become a common sight in his daily life, bar the one actual class they shared. All in all, as much as people played at unphased acceptance, it just seemed like one more thing that made people… careful around him. 

 

Grizz is grateful and ashamed to be as inconspicuous as he is.

 

It's an odd sort of bravery, he thinks. How Sam carries on in his own lofty little bubble, so above the shit people whisper and the stares and being treated like a fucking invalid at times.  He sees how people look at Sam, an undercurrent of casual condescension and pity and obvious politeness that just  _ has  _ to grate on him. 

 

Sam is so bright, Grizz knows because before this whole cluster he had sat in front of Sam in AP English- even though it's mostly full of Seniors. He's read Sam's work when Mrs. McHenry made them do peer-reviews; he's _smart._ That's what Grizz picks up on the most. There's no reason to assume that Sam is stupid, sure he can't talk like everyone else and sometimes he used to miss the bell for class, but he's fucking sharp. Grizz can just tell that Sam is so fucking quick _._ Grizz is smart but he's not _quick._ He's a problem solver, well read and well rounded, but Sam is full of these sharp grins and wry movements that give away his mood almost better than if he spoke aloud. He looks like he's in on some big obvious secret that no one else can figure out, and it makes Grizz want to know too; and Becca is always laughing, unapologetic _barks_ of laughter that make Grizz want to be friends with her too.

 

It never seems to matter though, because no matter how quick and articulate he signs, or how concisely his essays were formulated or how obviously witty he is, people still treat him like a child and it makes Grizz  _ angry  _ for him oddly enough. 

 

Then again, he's always been almost overly empathetic, sensitive, a bit of a crier to be honest. That's what made his mother so uncomfortable before he started whittling his outward persona down to football. He sometimes wonders why his parents, as hyper fixated on reputation as they were, let him dance when he was younger. Why the took it away so abruptly. Maybe they thought that his sensitivity wasn't being quelled quick enough in such a female dominant environment? Something archaic and vaguely misogynistic like that surely. The most ironic part is that having a gentle nature isn't even a prerequisite to being gay, but being in a locker room before he learned not to look- that was the final nail in the coffin. So to speak.

 

It's all so exhausting, but he's an analyst at heart. Leafing through paragraphs upon pages of information, contextualizing and recontextualizing phrases and word choices until he's wringed every ounce of meaning out into something that makes sense to him. It settles some kind of rising inevitable anxiety in him just as it wears him down to the bone. 

  
  
  



End file.
